Abstract
In El ensayo y su tema (2001), César Aira asserts that the essence of the essay lies in the thematic choice, so much so that, if it were the right choice -he dares say- the essay “would write itself”. This statement is a boutade, another whim in the utopian list of art that makes itself but, even so, or for this very reason, what could it possibly mean? Starting from this premise, this paper will attempt to articulate a journey through the biographical essays that César Aira wrote about Osvaldo Lamborghini (“Prólogo” a Novelas y Cuentos. Ediciones del Serbal, 1988) and Alejandra Pizarnik (Alejandra Pizarnik, Beatriz Viterbo, 1998, and Alejandra Pizarnik. 1936- 1972, Ediciones Omega, 2001) under the hypothesis that, in doing so, Aira not only executes the Borgean device of reactivating Argentine literature, whose model he finds in Borges’ Evaristo Carriego (1930), but he also institutes an “act of justice” regarding the black legend that surrounded them. While the “personal myth” -or “fable of style”- neutralizes that legend, or serves as a “mediation” between life and literature, Aira seems to be executing credulous readers and exegetes, ladino biographers, all of them crystallizers and perpetuators of a wrong image agreed upon by an innocent hermeneutics, as if assuming the attenuated profile of a defender who wields biographical-literary arguments and, unprejudiced, turns to the memory of friends who, from the very beginning, knew themselves to be posthumous writers.
Keywords:
César Aira; biographical essay; writer’s personal myth; Osvaldo Lamborghini; Alejandra Pizarnik